• The Houdini Market: Since 09 lows, stocks have shaken off flash crash, EU debt crisis, US government shutdown, and a potential default on its debt (Barron’s) see also Fiscal Crisis Leaves Stocks in a Sweet Spot (WSJ)
• About time: Wealth Fund Cautions Against Costs Exacted by High-Speed Trading (NYT)
• JPMorgan is close to a record $13 billion settlement. Is it too big to manage? (Washington Post) see also Who Really Wins if JPMorgan Pays $13 Billion? (Bloomberg)
• How to Find Stocks With Hidden Yields (Barron’s)
• How much did the shutdown cost the economy? (Washington Post)
• China Inc. Battles Big Oil for Century’s Biggest Find (Bloomberg) see also Asia Enjoys Stronger Global Demand (WSJ)
• Does Satan worship lower a Las Vegas mansion’s value? (Los Angeles Times)
• It’s time we stopped drinking the thinktank kool-aid (The Guardian)
• So the 5S is (allegedly) killing the 5C. Why is this bad news? (Stratechery)
• How to Be an Educated Consumer of Infographics: David Byrne on the Art-Science of Visual Storytelling (Brain Pickings)

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

8 Responses to “10 Monday AM Reads”

Apparently fraud, misrepresentation, and corruption are just desirable hallmarks of the American Way of Life. Life will be so much better when we can return back to the age of the Robber Barons. Oh wait, it looks like we have.

JP purchased the companies for next to nothing – with the clear understanding that getting them for that price means getting all the assets and all the liabilities. Now their little sock puppets whine that JP will have to live up to the liability part (management having already engorged themselves with record bonuses from the asset part).

At least all of these financial types are working diligently to help the people that were impacted severely by the foreclosures that came out of the mortgage crisis. They are also providing much needed assistance to the the local governments that found themselves hit hard by the downturn and impacts to their economic base:

If more financiers helped communities like this, everybody would have the opporutnity to seek new indentured servitude opportunities with company provided housing and purchases on credit from the local company store so that they pull themselves up by the bootstraps and move themselves up in the ranks of the financially immobile.

While the market has tracked corproate earnings as it should, it is also clear that the PE multiples that hte market has been selling at for the past 15 years have been greatly aided by the full faith and credit of every major government and central bank in the world that have been focused like a laser beam on supporting asset prices. I think the up and down stock market patterns would have looked very similar without the extraordinary efforts that have been put forth, but the actual values would likely have been significantly lower if they were absent.

Moderate to heavy overall volume this week …. There were three “home invasion” shootings (plus one “bar invasion” shooting), and likewise three men who accidentally shot their wives or girlfriends. Two people dropped their guns and shot themselves this week, one of whom was a sheriff’s deputy. And, as is almost always the case, at least one person shot themselves putting a gun in their waistband.

With the government shutdown over, we’ve got new numbers in from the TSA. During the period from September 27th through October 17th, encompassing the shutdown and the few days prior to it, the TSA found a whopping 99 guns on passengers attempting to board flights at airports around the country…

Two especially noteworthy stories this week. First, the woman in Fort Richey, FL who was shot in the leg by a bullet fired by a neighborhood man who’d just committed suicide with it …. And second, a couple in Austin, TX who, engaged in a domestic dispute (to put it mildly), were wrestling over an assault rifle when they accidentally fired it, shooting a neighbor who was outside working on his fence …When the Austin police showed up, the man had won control of the rifle, but failed to drop it when officers ordered him to do so, and was himself shot.

…a GunFAIL episode from last year, before we began our count, but which provides interesting perspective on the many accidents we read about which aren’t fatal, and reports of which indicate that victims “are expected to recover.” The Cumberland County (NC) Sheriff’s Office chief jailer, Maj. John R. McRainey, was wounded in late October of last year, when his gun accidentally discharged. “Although it is always a tragedy anytime that anyone suffers a gunshot wound, we are just thankful that it was no worse than it was,” Sheriff Moose Butler said at the time. But this week comes news that Maj. McRainey—after eight surgeries, 129 days in the hospital, and thrice-weekly dialysis due to damage to his kidneys—has died. …

Lastly, the counts of the child victims of GunFAIL, and the guns found in schools. Mercifully, just five kids accidentally shot this week, ages 5, 8, 14, 15 and 15. Guns turned up in schools this week in Monroe, LA, Louisville, KY, Berkeley, IL, Norfolk, VA, Black Mountain, NC, and St. Albans, VT.

Good to see that there is at least one large fund that is questioning the HFT scam. The way HFT can make money is to “sniff out” selling and bying of a stock and get in front of those trades. They harvest their profits from the lower sale price and higher purchase price their interventions create for the big funds. So they are making a living by robbing the pensions of the honest hard working police, firemen and teachers among others. The suggestion that they are also doing good by reducing spreads is BS. If we instituted a mandatory delay in all trades determined for each trade by drawing a random number between 0.1 and 5 seconds, HFT would stop, but spreads would not be any larger. There is pleanty of real traders to keep spreads down without the need to have these HFT scammers around.

I wonder if the intraday variability would be a way to quantitate the effects of HFT? Their effect is to lower the sell prices and increase the purchase prices for large selling/purchasing. Shouldn’t that give us higher intraday variability. To fight these robber barons we need to quantitate the damage they do.

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About Barry Ritholtz

Ritholtz has been observing capital markets with a critical eye for 20 years. With a background in math & sciences and a law school degree, he is not your typical Wall St. persona. He left Law for Finance, working as a trader, researcher and strategist before graduating to asset managementRead More...

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